Monday, April 6, 2015

Aaronson's first paragraph

Since I often mention MIT complexity theorist Scott Aaronson, I am giving a plug for his book.

You can tell a lot from the first paragraph of the first chapter of a book. That is where the author carefully attempts to grab your attention and give you a flavor of the book. Some authors will rewrite it 20 times until they get it right.

So why Democritus? First of all, who was Democritus? He was this Ancient Greek dude. He was born around 450 BC in this podunk Greek town called Abdera, where people from Athens said that even the air causes stupidity. He was a disciple of Leucippus, according to my source, which is Wikipedia. He's called a “pre-Socratic,” even though actually he was a contemporary of Socrates. That gives you a sense of how important he's considered: “Yeah, the pre-Socratics – maybe stick ’em in somewhere in the first week of class.” Incidentally, there's a story that Democritus journeyed to Athens to meet Socrates, but then was too shy to introduce himself.

Roger can't deal with the simple fact that the math intellectuals in France that he so admires can't even keep the electricity generators going. All they know is fraudulent derivatives. Illusory wealth. Areva is bankrupt.

Look at this experimental physicist (haha) from the UK who advises the government that it should spend billions on quantum computers, biology, solar cells, windmills, and every other retarded idea....look what he wastes his time on constantly: transhumanism...hahahaha...the UK can't even keep the bleeping lights on and this nut wastes all his time on con artists like Ray Kurzweil and Eric Drexler.

Tony Rothman in the article 'The Man Behind the Curtain' (American Scientist May-June 2011) explained what is wrong with Physics and Roger can only respond by deleting posts.

"Every problem has an exact answer. Not only that, students are expected to find it...Vanishingly few problems in physics have exact solutions and a physicists career is one of finding approximations and hopefully not being too embarrassed by them"

Too embarrassed by them? The approximations are complete guesses. If that isn't embarrassment, what is?

And simulations don't lead to any physical insight whatsoever. All these bullshit papers "and yes it was confirmed by numerical studies"...hahaha.

When is there ever going to be a physics book entitled "Here is all the fudges, swindles, and dirt under the rug, they don't teach you in physics graduate school"